The present invention relates generally to home appliance control and, more particularly, to a system and method for configuring a home appliance communications network.
As described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,057,874, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, cable TV operators typically provide their consumers with a cable converter box which functions as the interface between the cable communication network and the television/VCR of the consumer. The use of a cable converter box in a home entertainment system, however, creates difficulties for many consumers due to the inconveniences associated with using the cable converter box in conjunction with the other home appliances in the home entertainment system. For example, in order for a consumer to use their VCR to record a program being broadcast over the cable communication network, the consumer must coordinate the setting of the VCR and the setting of the cable converter box. If any of these home appliances are not set correctly, the attempt to record the program will be unsuccessful.
To solve this problem, manufacturers have provided cable converter boxes with the ability to remotely control the operation of the VCR. To this end, the cable converter box is provided with an infrared (IR) blaster which is used to transmit control codes from the cable converter box to the VCR. There are, however, several drawbacks to current cable converter boxes which include an IR blaster. One of the primary drawbacks is that there are many different types of VCRs and a correspondingly large number of different control codes. To be compatible with all VCRs, each cable converter box must have access to a library of VCR control codes for each of the VCRs. The consumer must then manually configure the cable converter box to select the appropriate control codes for controlling the VCR owned by the consumer. Unfortunately, requiring the cable converter box to be manually configured increases the likelihood that a configuration error may be introduced into the home theater communications network. This is especially true since consumers are unlikely to check that the cable converter box was configured correctly until such time after a desired program recording was missed.
Communications between home appliances in a home entertainment system need not be limited to transmissions originating from a cable box. For example, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,550,642, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, a VCR can also include circuitry for controlling a cable converter box. Thus, as the number of home appliances that need to be manually configured for control communications increase, the likelihood of introducing errors into the communications network correspondingly increases.
To overcome these and other problems, the subject invention resides in a system and method for configuring a target controlling appliance to communicate with a target controlled appliance. Setup information is supplied to a remote control to configure the remote control to communicate command codes to the target controlled appliance. A representation of configuration data is transmitted in a configuration message to the target controlling appliance. The configuration data is used within the remote control to select command codes from a command code library and results from the remote control setup procedure. The target controlling appliance uses the representation of the configuration data to automatically configure itself to communicate command codes to the target controlled appliance. In particular, the target controlling appliance uses the representation of the configuration data to select those command codes in a command code library that are recognizable by the target controlled appliance. The command code library could be local or remote to the target controlling appliance.
A better understanding of the objects, advantages, features, properties and relationships of the invention will be obtained from the following detailed description and accompanying drawings which set forth an illustrative embodiment and which are indicative of the various ways in which the principles of the invention may be employed.